Late Dr. Schapiro’s Collection Goes to Johns Hopkins

The Johns Hopkins University became a possessor of what is regarded by many authorities as the world’s foremost archaeological collection of Panama and Costa Rican lava sculpture and pottery. Collected by the late Dr. Louis Schapiro, of the Rockefeller Foundation, and presented in his memory by his widow and their son, Mark Schapiro, now a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins, the sixty odd pieces were displayed for the first time at Gilman Hall. Estimates have placed the value of the collection as high as $65,000.

Mrs. Schapiro, who has been living here since her son transferred to Hopkins from the University of Chicago last summer, said the collected pieces were unearthed and assembled by Dr. Schapiro in his eight years of public health work for the Rockefeller Foundation in Costa Rica and an equally long period in Panama.

She has an equally outstanding collection of ivories which she says will be presented to the university if her son enters the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and she, therefore, makes Baltimore her home. At present the collection of ivories is displayed at the Milwaukee Museum of Art, to which it was loaned by Dr. Schapiro sixteen years ago.

Dr. Schapiro, who received a doctor of public health degree from Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in 1923, sixteen years after receiving his medical degree from the George Washington University, died February 4, 1932, in Siam. He had gone there in August, 1930, with Mrs. Schapiro as an agent of the Rockefeller Foundation to serve as a public health adviser for the Siamese government. Posthumously, he was awarded the rank of prince.